Take This Job and Write It

By Jennifer Schuessler
Published: March 11, 2010, New York Times

Joblessness may be hovering around 10 percent, with some 29 million Americans out of work or searching for full-time employment, but there’s one group of people whose persistent alienation from regular employment has emerged as a particularly serious problem. I refer, of course, to novelists.

Illustration by Paul Rogers

In normal times, they tap away in their “offices” at Starbucks, thanking their lucky stars for the book contracts that allowed them to give up their day jobs. But in recent months a cry has gone out for fiction writers to get up from behind their laptops and get back to work, real work — or at least to start writing about it again.

Enough with the cozy stay-at-home dramas and urban picaresques featuring young slackers with no identifiable paycheck! The literary novel needs more tinkers and tailors, the argument goes. (The best-seller list seems to take care of the soldiers and spies.) In a video introduction to the latest issue of Granta, dedicated to the theme of “Work,” John Freeman, the magazine’s editor, lamented the literary “invisibility” of daily toil. The essayist Alain de Botton, writing in The Boston Globe, recently called for a new literature “that can proclaim the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the workplace.”

And in The Telegraph of London, John Lanchester, who took a break from novel-writing to research “I.O.U.,” his new primer on the financial crisis, asked why fiction tended to “break down” in the face of the complex modern economy. Work has become central to many people’s self-­conception, Lanchester noted. So why, in novels, does it tend to be “as much a marginal detail of a character’s life as her hair color”?

It’s tempting to see all this as nostalgia for the time when most people worked with their hands and a whaling ship or a military ambulance or a migrant workers’ camp could be an aspiring novelist’s Harvard and Yale. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American writers weren’t afraid to talk shop, whether the work in question was making money, as in William Dean Howells’s tales of young Gilded Age strivers, or making sausage, as in Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle.”

In the 1930s, as the Depression deepened, work became a particularly urgent subject for novelists, precisely because so many people didn’t have any. In John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” work, any kind of work, was a fragile bulwark against starvation. In the so-called proletarian novels of the period, with their evil bosses, downtrodden workers and heroic organizers, labor acquired a kind of romance — not because the actual tasks were ennobling, but because unions held the key to broader social redemption, generally along doctrinaire socialist lines. (Which didn’t necessarily imply aesthetic progress: the proletarian novel, the journalist Murray Kempton later wrote, was “rooted in the American tradition of bad literature.”) In his “U.S.A.” trilogy, John Dos Passos, like many literary men and women from privileged backgrounds, connected with the rising misery around him by describing the lives of the working, or workless, class. Other politically minded novelists, of authentically modest origins, made fiction the means for documenting the lives they had only barely escaped. As Morris Dickstein writes in “Dancing in the Dark,” his recent cultural history of the 1930s, the roughneck hero of James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan,” a house painter turned small-time thug, is “what the author himself might have become had he not left home and become a writer.”

The full article at NYT.